You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Covert Plants contributes to newly emerging discourses on the implications of vegetal life for the arts and culture. This stretches to changes in our perception of 'nature' and to the adapting roles of botany, evolutionary ecology, and environmental aesthetics in the humanities. Its editors and contributors seek various expressions of vegetal life rather than the mere representation of such, and they proceed from the conviction that a rigorous approach to thinking with and through vegetal life must be interdisciplinary. At a time when urgent calls for restorative care and reparative action have been sounded for the environment, this essay volume presents a range of academic and creative pers...
The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.
Well - known for her installations and major public art commissions that engage with architectural and biological forms, acclaimed Australian artist Janet Laurence is fascinated by the interplay of plant species, animals and people. In her work, represented in all major collections in Australia, Laurence constructs atmospheric spaces that allow for deep reflection on questions of climate change, ecology and extinction. Here, Prudence Gibson offers a new understanding of Laurence's BioArt and what her work says about humanity's relationship to the world.
Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves—Earth’s history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but hardly ephemeral, realm of modern-day life. Exploring the resource depletion and material resourcing required for us to use our devices to live networked lives, Parikka grounds his analysis in Siegfried Zielinski’s widely discussed notion of deep ti...
The Plant Thieves reveals remarkable stories from the National Herbarium of New South Wales — its people, its archives and its most guarded specimens. Who gets to collect plants, name them, propagate them, extract their chemicals, sell them and use them? Whose knowledge is it? And what can the people that work with plants, just outside the law, teach us about plant care? In The Plant Thieves, Prudence Gibson explores the secrets of the National Herbarium of New South Wales and unearths remarkable stories of plant naming wars, rediscovered lost species, First Nations agriculture, illegal drug labs and psychoactive plant knowledge. Gibson reveals the tale of the anti-inflammatory plant that ...
The first reader in critical plant studies, exploring a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field—the intersection of philosophy with plant science and the visual arts. In recent years, philosophy and art have testified to how anthropocentrism has culturally impoverished our world, leading to the wide destruction of habitats and ecosystems. In this book, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder show that the field of critical plant studies can make an important contribution, offering a slew of possibilities for scientific research, local traditions, Indigenous knowledge, history, geography, anthropology, philosophy, and aesthetics to intersect, inform one another, and lead interdisciplinary and tran...
None
None
The Ecopoetics of War explores the interrelationality of human and nonhuman entities in the context of conflict, as recorded in literature and culture. This collection of essays demonstrates the specific and fertile role of literature in representations of war, as it foregrounds the manifold ways in which the borders between human and nonhuman—including flora,fauna, and technology—become porous, thus questioning traditional onto-epistemological and ethical categories. Bringing together British, American, and postcolonial studies, The Ecopoetics of War covers a variety of historical periods, geographical areas, and literary genres. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, it intertwines war stud...
Focusing on programs from the 1970s to the early 2000s, this volume explores televised youth horror as a distinctive genre that affords children productive experiences of fear. Led by intrepid teenage investigators and storytellers, series such as Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated and Are You Afraid of the Dark? show how young people can effectively confront the terrifying, alienating, and disruptive aspects of human existence. The contributors analyze how televised youth horror is uniquely positioned to encourage young viewers to interrogate—and often reimagine—constructs of normativity. Approaching the home as a particularly dynamic viewing space for young audiences, this book attests to the power of televised horror as a domain that enables children to explore larger questions about justice, human identity, and the preconceptions of the adult world.